I am revising and not avoiding work again, I swear! Actually I *am* revising for my last exam on Friday namely “Networking Systems and Application” boo.

In the meanwhile I have some ALSA goodies for us the ones that run Linux on their Intel Macs. Your sound doesn’t work? Your built-in microphone doesn’t work? No more!

I’ve got my hands on the latest pinconfigs and cooked up a patch for ALSA, which adds support for all Intel Macs (macbooks, imacs, macminis etc, except for the 24” iMac and the Mac Pro) and also fixes the current configs. The changeset in HG is ff3ed7049f84. This patch enables the built-in microphone out of the box.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the microphone working, because, as I later found out, the Mux Capture control when maxed out disabled it. As I later found out after an investigation the Mux control is supposed to be limited to 2 step increase (+20db microphone boost), but was limited to 4 in ALSA. Without the boost the mic is pretty useless because the sound recorded has really low volume. The changeset to fix that in HG is 6ee58da0b892.

The last issue I stumbled upon is that when I had to unplug my speakers to plug in my headphones the microphone got disabled and I had to reload ALSA to fix it. The changeset to fix that in HG is 200fc3a7ef62.

At the end of the day thanks to Takashi Iwai and my pinconfigs patch everything works and behaves perfectly out of the box! Finally!